E-Seed: Biodegradable Seed Carrier Improves Aerial Seeding

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#Erodium or #Filaree seeds have a spiral body with coiled tails that allows them to establish in soil easily when unwound. This inspired Lining Yao and colleagues to create a versatile and sustainable structure that could be used for many other plants, particularly to facilitate reforestation as well as embed functional items like sensors.

This is very interesting, and I believe additional improvements that make use of native symbionts like beneficial microbes could help vivify sites of ecological destruction such as unnaturally large wildfires.

More information from the Morphing Matter Lab at Carnegie Mellon University can be found in the Nature article "Autonomous self-burying seed carriers for aerial seeding".

"Our three-tailed carrier has an 80% drilling success rate on flat land after two triggering cycles, due to the beneficial resting angle (25°–30°) of its tail anchoring, whereas the natural Erodium seed’s success rate is 0%. Our carriers can carry payloads of various sizes and contents including biofertilizers and plant seeds as large as those of whitebark pine, which are about 11 mm in length and about 72 mg."